PUBLICS AND MARKETS What s wrong with Neoliberalism?

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1 PUBLICS AND MARKETS What s wrong with Neoliberalism? Clive Barnett Faculty of Social Sciences The Open University Milton Keynes MK7 6AA United Kingdom The Handbook of Social Geography, edited by Susan Smith, Sallie Marston, Rachel Pain, and John Paul Jones III. London and New York: Sage. 1). THEORISIZING NEOLIBERALISM AS A POLITICAL PROJECT Neoliberalism has become a key object of analysis in human geography in the last decade. Although the words neoliberal and neoliberalism have been around for a long while, it is only since the end of the 1990s that they have taken on the aura of grand theoretical terms. Neoliberalism emerges as an object of conceptual and empirical reflection in the process of restoring to view a sense of political agency to processes previously dubbed globalization (Hay 2002). This chapter examines the way in which neoliberalism is conceptualised in human geography. It argues that, in theorisizing neoliberalism as a political project, critical human geographers have ended up reproducing the same problem they ascribe to the ideas they take to be driving forces behind contemporary transformations: they reduce the social to a residual effect of more fundamental political-economic rationalities. Proponents of free-markets think that people should act like utility-maximising rational egoists, despite lots of evidence that they don t. Critics of neoliberalism tend to assume that increasingly people do act like this, but they think that they ought not to. For critics, this is what s wrong with neoliberalism. And it is precisely this evaluation that suggests that there is something wrong with how neoliberalism is theorized in critical human geography. In critical human geography, neoliberalism refers in the first instance to a family of ideas associated with the revival of economic liberalism in the mid-twentieth century. This is taken to include the school of Austrian economics associated with Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter, characterised by a strong

2 commitment to methodological individualism, an antipathy towards centralised state planning, commitment to principles of private property, and a distinctive antirationalist epistemology; and the so-called Chicago School of economists, also associated with Hayek, but also including leading monetarist economist Milton Friedman. David Harvey s definition of neoliberalism condenses a set of emphases that characterize accounts of this object of analysis more generally: Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit (Harvey 2005:2). The ascendancy of this ideology is recounted through a standardized narrative that touches on a series of focal points (Hoffmann et al 2006): a period of economic crisis which shook the foundations of the post-world War Two, Keynsnian settlement as the conjuncture in which previously marginal neoliberal economic theories were was translated into real-world policy scenarios; the role of economists from the University of Chicago in Pinochet s Chile in the 1970s, Reagonomics in the USA in the 1980s, and so-called Thatcherism in the UK in the 1980s; the role of key international agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank as responsible in diffusing neoliberalism globally through the so-called Washington Consensus in development and foreign aid policy; and the taken-for-granted claim that neoliberalism has, over time, been transformed from an ideology into hegemonic common-sense. Wendy Larner (2006, 450) observes that the concept of neoliberalism is overwhelmingly mobilized and deployed by left-wing academics and political activists. As a critics term, neoliberalism is presented as an ideational project and political programme that seeks to supplant collective, public values with individualistic, private values of market rationality as the guiding principles of state policy, economic governance, and everyday life. It should be said that there is no single critical conceptualization of neoliberalism circulating in human geography. Neoliberalism is sometimes conceptualised as a policy paradigm; sometimes more broadly as a hegemonic ideology; and sometimes as a distinctive form of governmentality (Larner 2000). Linking these three different approaches is an overwhelming emphasis on the guiding force of explicit forms of knowledge in shaping social change. The explicit conceptual elaboration of critical theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization has been pioneered by human geographers and spatially-sensitive sociologists. Neoliberalism is understood as an ideology that is shaped in a few 2

3 centres, which then diffuses outwards, and a political project that aims to re-order the territorial framing of capital accumulation. The resulting process of neoliberalization is understood to be geographically uneven. The basic outlines of neoliberalism as an object of critical analysis include: Neoliberalism is understood as an ideology that encompasses various forms of free-market fundamentalism; Neoliberalism is diffused and translated across contexts very quickly. Neoliberalism is operative at various spatial scales; Neoliberalism displaces established models of welfare provision and state regulation through policies of privatization and de-regulation; Neoliberalism brings off various changes in subjectivity by normalizing individualistic self-interest, entrepreneurial values, and consumerism. In the constitution of neoliberalism as an object of critical analysis, the overwhelming emphasis is upon neoliberalism as an ideational project. It is from this emphasis that the agenda for geographical research follows: Tracking the diffusion of this ideology through different geographical contexts; Mapping the variable articulation of this ideology with other processes in different places; Examining the normalization of this ideology in spatial practices of subjectformation. If the theoretical constitution of neoliberalism as an ideological project generates an automatic agenda for geographical research, then it also constructs the task of critical analysis in a distinctive way. If neoliberalization is assumed to work through the naturalization of market rationalities and the normalization of individualistic egoism, then the critical task becomes one of exposing the various dimensions of neoliberalization as social constructs. Critical theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization provide a compelling moral narrative in which recent history is understood in terms of a motivated shift away from public and collective values towards private and individualistic values. Critical narratives of neoliberalism reinforce the image of there being a clear-cut divide between two sets of values those of private, individualistic self-interest on the one hand, and those of public, collective interests on the other. There is a preconstructed normative framing of these theories around a set of conceptual and moral binaries: market versus state; public versus private; consumer versus citizen; liberty versus equality; individual utility versus collective solidarity; self-interested egoism versus other-regarding altruism. Theories of neoliberalism go hand in hand with a standard form of criticism that bemoans the decline of public life, active citizenly virtue, and values of egalitarianism and solidarity. These theories project ahead of themselves criteria of evaluation (cf. Castree 2008): neoliberalism reduces democracy, creates poverty and inequality, and is imposed either from the outside or by unaccountable elites. The conceptual analysis of neoliberalism is therefore always already critical, but at a cost. They are condemned to invoke their favoured positive values (e.g. the public realm, collective solidarity, equality, democracy, care, social justice) in a moralistic register without addressing normative problems of how practically to negotiate equally compelling values. And in so far as theories of neoliberalism dismiss considerations of rational action, motivation, and decentralised coordination as so much ideology, they remain chronically constricted in their capacity to reflect seriously on questions of 3

4 institutional design, political organisation and economic coordination which, one might suppose, remain an important task for any critical theory. Section 2 introduces the basic outlines of conceptualisations of neoliberalism in geography and related fields. This section considers how neoliberalism and neoliberalization have been conceptualised in Marxist political-economy. Neoliberalism is understood as a revival and renewal of laissez-faire economic liberalism, holding to principles of free markets and the minimal state. Section 3 looks at how Foucault s ideas about liberal governmentality are used to bolster these political-economy narratives. Section 4 argues that it is worth taking seriously the way in which public rationalities are problematized in a family of economic models of bureaucracy, welfare, and democracy that attract far less attention in geography s neoliberalism than the ideas of free-market liberals like Hayek and Friedman. Section 5 discusses some of the normative blindspots of prevailing conceptualisations of neoliberalism, and by extension, of critical human geography more broadly. 2). POLITICAL ECONOMIES OF NEOLIBERALISM 2.i). NEOLIBERALISM AS ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESION In Harvey s (2005) conceptualisation, neoliberalism emerges in response to the economic crisis of the 1970s, displacing the embedded liberalism represented by Keynsianism with a more voracious and transparent strategy aimed at restoring capital accumulation. Harvey s narrative focuses on the ascendancy of finance capital over the last three decades. On this analysis, neoliberalism has not been particularly successful as a means of restoring conditions for stable economic growth and capital accumulation. It has been a redistributive rather than a generative programme, driven by strategies of accumulation by dispossession (ibid ). This is a mode of accumulation which, through practices like privatization and financialization, seeks to transfer publicly or commonly held assets and resources into private property. In Harvey s analysis, accumulation by dispossession has the effect of fragmenting and particularising social conflicts (ibid., 178), in contrast to strategies which sustain accumulation through transformations to the labour-process based on extended wagelabour, which have a universalizing effect in so far as they render transparent their own class content. In Harvey s account, neoliberalism is defined as a theory of political-economic practices of free markets, which is highly flexible and can be implemented by both liberal democratic and authoritarian regimes. Since neoliberalization is understood as an accumulation strategy aimed at restoring class power, neoliberalism, with its seductive rhetoric of freedom, has primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal (ibid., 19). So it turns out that as a theory, neoliberalism does not serve a terribly practical function in actually pursuing accumulation by dispossession at all. It is mainly a benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power (ibid. 119). The defining claim in Marxist political-economies of neoliberalism is that the ideational project represented by neoliberalism, supposedly formulated by Hayek and others, has been translated into a project of socio-economic transformation, neoliberalization, whose primary agent is the state : Neoliberalization has in effect swept across the world like a vast tidal wave of institutional reform and discursive adjustment (Harvey 2006, 145). Harvey s narrative explains this translation of theory 4

5 into reality by invoking the Gramscian idea of hegemony, suggesting that neoliberal ideas have become incorporated into the common-sense way we interpret, live in and understand the world (ibid.). The deployment of the term hegemony in politicaleconomic accounts of neoliberalism over-estimates the degree to which the reproduction of unequal social relations depends on winning the consent of subordinated, exploited actors. In Harvey s account, neoliberalism becomes hegemonic through a vaguely defined ideological mechanism of naturalization : For any system of thought to become hegemonic requires the articulation of fundamental concepts that become so deeply embedded in common-sense understandings that they become taken for granted and beyond question. For this to occur not any old concepts will do. A conceptual apparatus has to be constructed that appeals almost naturally to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities that seem to inhere in the social world we inhabit. (Harvey 2006, 146). The intuitively appealing concept that neoliberalism deploys is freedom, any usage of which is therefore cast under a dark cloud of suspicion. Social justice on the other hand is assumed to have an obvious, unambiguous resonance. Harvey (2005, 40-41) alludes to hegemony being secured by the changing experiential basis of everyday life under volatile capitalism. This leaves open the possibility of exploring the ways in which various modalities of rational action are framed and mobilized in the construction of hegemony. However, the analysis of neoliberalization as a redistributive rather than generative process of accumulation by dispossession precludes the possibility that capital accumulation might be a positivesum game, and that this could provide material grounds through which legitimation is secured. Neoliberalism ends up being legitimated ideologically, by manipulating the representational content that people they carry around in their heads. Hegemony is presented as a cultural process of constructing common sense that is misleading, obsfucatory, and disguises real problems (ibid). Geography s Marxism therefore attains its culturalist high-point in seeking to sustain an economistic rendering of the contemporary scene. 2.ii). NEOLIBERALIZATION AS TENDENTIAL TRAJECTORY Theories of neoliberalism effectively abolish the recurrent problem in Marxism of the relative autonomy of the state by describing neoliberalization as a political project which, at the level of theory, favours market relations over state intervention while, at the level of hegemonic practice, has successfully captured the state as the means of pursuing its objectives. Capital s internal logic, conceptually isolated through an analysis pitched at a very high level of abstraction, is then found to cascade downwards until it is directly voiced by the state. The idea that the state voices the class interests of capital, and thus becomes a vehicle for its own diminution, is most clearly expressed in state-theoretic accounts of neoliberalism which draw on regulation theory. These approaches emphasize processes of geographical re-scaling in narrating a shift from Fordist to post-fordist regimes of capital accumulation. Regulation theory focuses on the question of how a crisis-ridden system like capitalism establishes stable conditions for growth. It draws on intermediate concepts to explain the functional relationship between particular organisations of the labour process and systems of production (a regime of accumulation) and extended infrastructures for social reproduction (a mode of regulation). Under Fordism, so the story goes, high wages and high profits were sustained through Keynsian devices that rolled-out welfare provision and state 5

6 infrastructures to sustain high levels of consumption. Accumulation and regulation were both scaled at the national level. The crisis of Fordism, in turn, is manifest in the reordering of these different institutional arrangements, not least in terms of the hollowing-out of the national level, as various regulatory functions are re-located to sub-national and supra-national scales (Jessop 2002b, Peck 2001). From this perspective, neoliberalism is the tendential trajectory from the Keynsian Welfare National State to a Schumpterian Workfare Regime, expressed in a raft of policies for managing a new relationship between a post-fordist regime of accumulation and a re-tooled mode of regulation. Describing neoliberalism as tendential is a way of claiming that this is the leading trajectory of transformation everywhere, even though nowhere in particular accords to either of these ideal-typical models. In the regulationist account of neoliberalism, the culturalist inflection to political-economy is given even freer reign than in Harvey. Objects of regulation, and indeed the dimensions of economic crisis itself, are understood to be constructed through narratives (Jessop 1999). Globalization functions as a master narrative of crisis, and neoliberalism provides the discursive solution to this crisis. The reference to Schumpeter in the regulationist analysis is important for understanding the normative background to political-economy approaches to neoliberalism. Writing in the 1940s, Schumpeter (1942) presented capitalism as a vibrant system characterised by creative destruction, in which capitalist risk-takers pursuing their own self-interest with minimal state interference would generate investment and innovation to sustain high levels of economic growth. To secure this positive-sum outcome, capitalism should be subjected only to the regulatory tinkering of the liberal state in the interests of maximising market efficiency. Standing opposed to Schumpeter in the regulationist narrative of neoliberalism is the figure of Karl Polanyi. Polanyi (1944), also writing in the 1940s, provided a compelling moral critique of the idea that human welfare could best be secured by letting free-markets reign supreme. For Polanyi, free markets can only create rapid growth by undermining the conditions of human sociality upon which they depend. For him, creative destruction was more destructive than it was creative. To be sustainable, and to promote human welfare, economic relationships needed to be embedded in a fabric of regulations, institutions, and social norms. Polanyi s ideas provide both an ontological framework within which to locate the pathological consequences of free-market fundamentalism, as well as a normative framework in which to criticise the limitations of this ideology. Neoliberalism represents the triumph of a narrowly formal economizing mode of market rationality, which in turn leads to the disembedding of economic activities from a wider context of substantive social relationships, institutions and norms upon which long-term socio-economic stability depends. This in turn generates an ongoing dynamic through which neoliberalism constantly adjusts to the volatile crises it is itself responsible for. Theories of neoliberalism therefore exploit an ambivalence in Polanyi s legacy. On the one hand, there is an argument that seems to suggest that market rationality, if left to its own devices, could actually float free from substantive relationships. On the other hand, there is an implication that even the freest of free markets must be embedded in some context of norms and institutions. This ambivalence is exploited in theories of neoliberalism by appealing to the either/or sense of embedded versus disembedded markets to make critical judgements; while deploying the second, descriptive sense to bolster the argument that economic relationships are always functionally sustained by particular projects of social regulation overseen by the state. 6

7 Polanyi is an important source for sociologized critiques of free-market theories. In the discipline of economic sociology, it is argued that all markets, even the most free, are embedded in broader contexts. In institutional economics, institutions are defined with reference to an expansive field of rules, routines and norms. In actornetwork theory, emphasis is on the ways in which various technologies and devices frame fields of action as ones governed by market rationality, and in turn generate various unintended consequences. All three of these fields cast doubt on the whether a purely free market as envisaged in neoclassical economics is possible. In principle, there is scope here for considering how markets can be organised in accord with public values of care, welfare, and equity (Smith 2005, Rodríguez-Pose and Storper 2006). But the primary lesson drawn from this work by theorists of neoliberalism is to argue that markets and other economic relationships are socially constructed. This is presented as if it were a knock-down argument against the theoretical perspective of mainstream economics, which is itself taken to be nothing but an instrument of neoliberalization. In particular, it is concluded that the social constructedness of markets effectively invalidates any and all concern with the analysis of rational action by individualized actors (Peck 2005). In geography s theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization, the argument about the social construction of markets serves only to sustain a claim about the highly orchestrated qualities of contemporary politicaleconomic transformations. Claims about the social construction of markets are closely related to arguments about the importance of drawing into view how neoliberalism is a political project. But the regulationist approach works with a rather thin understanding of what counts as political action. The state is understood to be a political actor only in so far as it mobilises particular types of resource (coercive mechanisms like military power, policing, taxation; ideological resources like education and nationalism) in pursuit of its generic function of cohering together a class-divided society. Political refers in this approach to a means of acting (through the state) governed by a particular set of motivations (the self-interest of class actors). It is only in this sense that neoliberalism is understood to be a political product. The notion that neoliberalism is best theorized as an ideational project has a pedigree that pre-dates geography s detailed theorization of this topic over the last decade (e.g. Przeworski 1992). It leads inevitably to a focus on elites as the primary agents of change (see Genev 2005). In Peck and Tickell s (2002) account of the neoliberalization of space, this emphasis on neoliberalism as an ideational project is directly connected to a distinctive geographical programme of research on diffusion and contextual articulation. It is argued that the ideas of neoliberal thinkers cascade through various academic and non-academic knowledge networks and gained ascendancy in the United Kingdom and United States in the 1980s (see Plehwe et al 2006). Neoliberalism has a heartland in the home spaces of USA and UK, and then diffuses through various zones of extension. This hierarchical distinction follows naturally from the emphasis placed on neoliberalism as first and foremost an ideational project. This in turn underwrites a linear model of geographical analysis, in which the generic dimensions of neoliberal ideology are diffused outwards, touching ground in particular contexts where they articulate with and hybridize the contextual landscapes of particular cities, regions, or nation-states in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. This picture of the geography of neoliberalization supports, and in turn is supported by, a distinctive understanding of the task of the relationship between empirical analysis and theory building. Any observed variation or adaptation of neoliberal 7

8 ideology to local context does not cause theorists of neoliberalization to revise the basics of their theories. They only confirm the main outlines of their narratives. Peck and Tickell (2002, 388) argue that while neoliberalism takes on different forms in different places, the family resemblances between these forms some essential features to be isolated: adequate conceptualizations must be attentive to both the local peculiarities and the generic features of neoliberalism. There is a telling slippage here between a geographical characteristic ( local peculiarities ) and a formal characteristic ( generic features ). The generic character of neoliberalism is located in the ideological content of a set of political philosophies, economist theorems, and policy prescriptions (Peck 2004). The claim that neoliberal ideas are enshrined in global rules and circulated by a set of global regulatory agencies such as the WTO, IMF and World Bank which discipline states around the world is sustained through an entrenched vocabulary of discourse and material practices. The term discourse has come to serve as a kind of inferential transponder that explains away just how highly abstract philosophical principles (from Hobbes or Locke or Smith) and highly arcane social science theorems (from micro-economics and public choice theory) manage to bring-off disciplinary effects on national governments, state agencies, and ordinary citizens. This style of theoretical reasoning is what makes neoliberalism an exemplary geographical object of analysis. Refinements of theories of neoliberalization call for more attention to the path-dependent interaction between neoliberal programmes and context-specific institutional and social frameworks (Brenner and Theodore 2002); more empirical work on the variability of neoliberalism as policy paradigms are transferred from place to place (Bondi and Laurie 2005); and considerations of the disjunctures between liberal and neoliberal programmes and imperatives (Mitchell 2004). In short, neoliberalism is a theoretical object that automatically generates a series of geographical enquiries: the analysis of the diffusion of neoliberal ideology through the political processes of neoliberalization; the analysis of the contextual specificity of neoliberalization, and of its articulation at different scales; the analysis of the hybrization of neoliberalism with other political projects (e.g. neo-conservatism) and with other social relations (e.g. gender, race, ethnicity); the re-ordering of public and private spaces of work and care; and finally (always finally), there is plenty of scope for the analysis of social movements that arise in response to and in order to resist neoliberalism and the effects of neoliberalization. The meta-theories of neoliberalism that generate this field of geographical enquiry remain immune to criticism. They are refined by focussing on neoliberalization. This is concept that allows from the acknowledgment of diverse origins and varied pathways of unfolding, its uneven and incomplete character, while all the time insisting that it remains a tendential trajectory of contemporary life (Peck 2006). Whether it is theoretically coherent to ascribe general features to such a variable phenomenon, and whether the sorts of generalization from specific cases that these sort of claims require is coherent, is far from certain (Castree 2006). What remains unclear is why, if neoliberalism never appears in pure form, and when it does appear it is always a compound with other projects and processes, the outcome of any neoliberal ideational project should continue to be called neoliberalization. What is it that makes the hybrid compounds through which these specific ideologies 8

9 make themselves felt always liable to be named neoliberal, if this is only one of their components? The one generic feature that high level abstractions of neoliberalism do not specify is the parasitical force through which neoliberalism does not just articulate with other processes, but which gives it an asymmetrical energy in shaping corrosive trajectories of future capitalist development in its own image. For critics, it is this parasitical and corrosive force, implied but never specified, that is what s wrong with neoliberalism. 2.iii). DE-POLITICIZING POLITICS In theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization, the theoretical preference for very high levels of abstraction is associated with a tendency to make a geographical virtue out of the consistent failure to theorize the state as anything other than a functional attribute of the reproductive requirements of capital. Particular state-formations and patterns of political contention are acknowledged only as local, territorialized, contextual factors that help to explain how the universalizing trajectory of neoliberalism, orchestrated from the centre and organised through global networks, nonetheless always generate hybrid assemblages of neoliberalism. This style of theorizing makes it almost impossible to gainsay the highly generalised claims about neoliberalism as an ideology and neoliberalization as a state-led project by referring to empirical evidence that might seem to contradict these grand concepts. For example, it is almost taken-for-granted that the hegemony of neoliberalism is manifest in the reduction of state expenditures on welfare in face of external pressures of neoliberal globalization. Empirical evidence for welfare state decline is, in fact, far from conclusive. Welfare regimes have actually proved highly resilient in terms of both funding and provisioning (see Taylor-Gooby 2001). At the same time, the extent to which open market economies foster rather than menace high-levels of national welfare provision is also hotly debated (Taylor-Gooby 2003). In both cases, the idea of any straightforward shift from state to market seems a little simplistic (Clarke 2003). But from the perspective of geography s meta-theories of neoliberalization, all of this is so much grist to the contextualizing mill. Contrary evidence can be easily incorporated into these theories precisely because they layer levels of conceptual abstraction onto scales of contextual articulation. Presenting differential state-formation as a contextual variable is related to a much broader displacement of political action in general to a lower level of conceptual abstraction in theories of neoliberalism. One aspect of this is the persistent treatment of a broad range of social movement activity as primarily a secondary response to processes of neoliberalization. But more fundamentally, Marxist political-economies of neoliberalism pay almost no attention, at a conceptual level, to the causal significance of the institutional and organisational forms that shape political action (Hay 2004). This is indicative of a broader failure to think through how distinctive forms of contemporary democratic politics shape pathways of economic development and capital accumulation. Theories of neoliberalism take for granted the capacity of states to implement particular policies in order to put in place the regulatory conditions for particular accumulation strategies. This overlooks the degree to which the time-space constitution of democratic politics in liberal democracies serve as substantial impediments to the achievement of neo-liberal goals (Johnston and Glasmeier 2007, 15). Given the territorialization of party support and the territorialized organization of electoral politics, liberal democracy generates strong pressures that militate against wholly flexible and open labour markets, sustain subsidies and protectionist measures, and support the promotion of investment in 9

10 particular locations. In theories of neoliberalism, processes of free market reform in the USA and UK since the 1980s are considered models of more general tendential logics. But these examples might be quite specific outcomes of the balance of political forces in those polities when compared to the patterns of welfare reform and tax policy in European countries (Prasad 2005; see also Glyn 2007). Taking into account the ways in which state action is constrained by the time-space constitution of electoral, representative democracy is particularly relevant for understanding why relatively wealthy, advanced industrial economies do not conform to the tendential logic predicted by political-economy theories of neoliberalization. These same constraints might be operative elsewhere too. It is routine to suggest that neoliberalism is imposed on developing economies externally, through the Washington Consensus promulgated by the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. However, Stokes (2002) argues that patterns of neoliberalization in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s can be explained in large part by analysis of the dynamics between electoral campaigning, party mobilisation, mandate and accountability as they played themselves out in periods of democratic transition and consolidation. In her account of neoliberalism by surprise, democratic governance, party competition, electoral accountability, and responsiveness to constituents interests all play crucial roles in explaining whether, how, and why neoliberal policies are adopted. Strictly speaking, these sorts of considerations do not need to disturb the secure conceptual vantage-point offered by political-economy theorizations of neoliberalism. This paradigm is, as already suggested, internally attuned to recognize the variety and hybridity of neoliberalisms, and is able to ascribe this to the necessary articulation of generic neoliberal ideology, circulated globally, with territorialized logics operative at lower geographical scales. Whether or not one finds this convincing comes down to a decision between different styles of theory. Political-economy approaches seek after high-level abstractions in order to identify fundamental features of phenomena (the logic of capital accumulation in Harvey, the capitalist state in Jessop, neoliberal ideology in Peck and Tickell). These abstract imperatives are then mapped empirically through a kind of deductive cascade, where they bump into other phenomena, like states, or racial formations, or gender relations. Because of their distinctive ontological features (e.g. their institutional qualities, their territorial qualities, their discursive qualities, and their identity-based qualities), these phenomena have never been amenable to the same sort of explanatory rationalism that allows the dynamics of capital accumulation to be defined so purely. The effect of these theorizations is to de-politicize politics. If the dominant logic of state action can always be discerned from understanding the logic of capital accumulation and the balance of class forces, then that is really all one ever needs to really know (Clarke 2004a). This de-politicization of politics out there is an effect of the inflation of the political force ascribed to the academic work of critique: analysis of politics is reduced to a matter of understanding how a logic already known in advance is differentially enacted, so that the critical task of such analysis can be presented as a political act of exposing naturalized forms as social constructs. Despite the polite nods to ideas of relative autonomy, political-economy theories of neoliberalism only retain coherence by appealing in the last instance to a reductionist theory of the state. Gramscian state theory, with its strategic relational view of the state, is a pretty sophisticated version of reductionism, able to acknowledge all sorts of autonomous action by state agencies, beset by all sorts of contradictions with underlying logics of capital accumulation. Nevertheless, narratives of neoliberalization hold fast to two basic assumptions about the state. 10

11 Firstly, the state is understood as a territorialised power-container exercising sovereignty through its monopoly of violence and definitions of legality (Harvey 2005, 159). Secondly, the state is understood as an arena in and through which conflicts defined by reference to class interests are fought out. For example, in Harvey s characterization, during Keynesian embedded liberalism the state became a force field that internalized class relations (ibid, 11), and in turn neoliberalization reflects the conquest of this constituted state power in order to enact accumulation by dispossession. Combining these two assumptions leads to an analysis in which the variable scope, extent and reach of sovereign state action is explained with reference to changing balance of social forces. The state is understood as an object and instrument of class struggle, but not as an organisation-for-itself (Skocpol 1985; Mann 1988). In theories of neoliberalization, this concept of the state as a constituted sovereign actor that is also an arena for social conflict underwrites the claim that the state can and does now express the class interests of capital univocally. This sort of analysis continues to take for granted the sovereign capacities of the state as an instrument for the forcing through of various political programmes translating ideational projects. Neoliberalism and neoliberalization would appear somewhat differently from the polymorphous view of the state, premised on what Mann (1993, 52) calls organizational materialism. This view focuses on the distinctive characteristics of political institutions and their relationships with other actors. Such a non-reductionist approach suggests a different view of the restructuring of state actions upon which so much analysis of neoliberalism and neoliberalization focuses. An organisational materialist view of state-formation opens the way for an alternative style of analysis of the simultaneous retreat of the state from certain areas of activity and proliferation into other areas that so exercises political-economy accounts of neoliberalization. It suggests an analysis of the extent to which state actions are determined by the interactions between the dynamics of historically sedimented state imperatives and institutional frameworks and their responses to the changing dynamics of mobilisation and organisation of collective actors in civil society, broadly defined (see Offe 1996). Taking the relational constitution of state-society interactions (see Corbridge 2007, Migdal 2001) seriously would allow analyses of contemporary transformations to bring into view the pro-active role of a series of actors, projects, and processes that get little if any attention in political-economy accounts of neoliberalization. This would include consideration of the secular dynamics of individualization and risk (Beck and Beck 2001, Taylor-Gooby et al 1999), and how these are transforming the dynamics of collective-will formation which relationally constitute the scope and content of state action. It would include greater consideration of the complex dynamics of bureaucratic and administrative transformation (Du Gay 2000). It would include the geographical dynamics of social reproduction which are not simply adjustments to neoliberalization (Yeates 2002). Moreover, it would open space for appreciation of the pro-active role of social movement mobilisations in emergent forms of non-governmental politics (Feher 2007). It is also a view consistent with recent work which theorizes the ways in which state activities continue to reach into the ordinary spaces of everyday life (see Corbridge et al 2006, Painter 2005). As already suggested, theories of neoliberalism are remarkably flexible in the face of empirical evidence that seems to run counter to the pattern of state roll-back and market expansion predicted by the neoliberalization hypothesis. Political-economy approach breaking point when they have to account for the observable empirical fact that, contrary to the objective they project onto the neoliberal project, it is found that 11

12 states have not straightforwardly withdrawn from welfare provision or other forms of social regulation at all. Faced with this inconvenience, Peck and Tickell (2002) conjure up a neat conceptual distinction between what they call the roll-back phase of neoliberalism and the roll-out phase. The roll-out phase is triggered by the ongoing need of state actors to manage the crises generated by the roll-back phase. This is a selective deployment of the Polanyian theme of embedding and disembedding. It is used to suggest that contemporary processes of active statebuilding around issues of welfare, crime, family policy, urban order, participation, and cultural inclusion are still best understood as the natural extensions of an ideology that is supposed to be based on a straightforward opposition between state and market. This distinction between roll-back and roll-out phases makes neoliberalization look less like a tendential path of development than a tendentious theoretical projection of a simplistic moral order onto a rather more complex reality. Nevertheless, this distinction inadvertently opens up room for tethering an alternative theoretical framework to the regulationist paradigm. In order to describe and explain the rollout of new welfare and regulatory regimes by putatively neoliberal states, geographers have increasingly turned to the theoretical vocabulary of governmentality. 3). NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY The concept of governmentality is a neologism used by Michel Foucault (1991) in his work on modern forms of political power. It is a term that combines government and rationality, suggesting a form of political analysis that focuses on the forms of knowledge that make objects visible and available for governing. In Foucault s terms, governmentality refers to a distinctive modality for exercising power, one which is not reducible to the state. Governmentality is understood to work at a distance by seeking to shape the conduct of conduct. This in turn implies that governmentality refers to a wide range of points of application, including fields of action not ordinarily thought of as political, such as medicine, education, religion, or popular culture. Governmentality is a notion that develops Foucault s distinctive approach to the analysis of power relations. His work not only relocates power, dispersing it away from sovereign actions of centralised state agencies. It rethinks the type of action through which power is exercised (see Brown 2006b). In fundamental respects, the significance of the notion of governmentality for social theory turns on the interpretation of just what sort of theory of action this notion presupposes. The next two sections explore just where this significance lies. Lemke (2002) argues that Foucault s work on governmentality provides a means of understanding the relationships between knowledge, strategies of power and technologies of the self that can usefully augment narratives of neoliberalism. From this perspective, neoliberalism is understood as a political rationality that tries to render the social domain economic and to link a reduction in (welfare) state services and security systems to the increasing call for personal responsibility and selfcare (Lemke 2001, 203). On this understanding, governmentality is a concept that augments the political-economy approaches outlined in the previous section. For example, Ong s (1999) account of the distinctive forms of governmentality deployed by post-developmental states revolves around the assumption that various regulatory regimes manipulate cultural discourses to selectively make people into certain sorts of economic subjects consistent with the objectives of particular national strategies of accumulation. Jessop (2007, 40) has also argued that the convergence between 12

13 Marxism and governmentality studies follows from the mutually supportive emphases of the two approaches: while Marx seeks to explain the why of capital accumulation and state power, Foucault s analyses of disciplinarity and governmentality try to explain the how of economic exploitation and political domination. This formulation acknowledges Foucault s own observation that he was concerned with the how of power, but assumes that this descriptive focus merely augments the explanatory project of Marxist political-economy. What is covered over here is a fundamental philosophical difference between these two approaches: the concept of governmentality implies an analysis that focuses on the description of practices instead of causes and explanations. The Marxist and Foucauldian approaches are not necessarily as easily reconciled as it might appear. There are two main areas of difference between these approaches: their respective understandings of the state and of discourse (Traub-Werner 2007, ). Political-economy approaches assume fairly static models of the state and the market, and view their relationship in terms of contradictory movements of de-regulation and re-regulation; they also assume that discourse is a representational concept, and focus upon how discourses are theorized differentially materialised in particular contexts. In contrast, governmentality refers to modalities of power that stretch far beyond the state ; and discourse is not a representational system so much as a distinctive concept of action, referring to the combination of technologies, means of representation and fields of possibility. Despite the underlying philosophical differences between governmentality and Marxist political economy, Foucault s notion has become an important reference point in recent debates about neoliberalization (Larner 2003, Barnett 2005). If there is such a thing as a neoliberal project, then it is assumed that it must work by seeking to bring into existence lots of neoliberal subjects (cf. Barnett et al 2008). Work on this topic assumes that extending the range of activities that are commodified, commercialized and marketized necessarily implies that people s subjectivities need to be re-tooled and re-worked - as active consumers, entrepreneurial subjects, or empowered participants (e.g. Bondi 2005, Gökariksel and Mitchell 2005, Mitchell 2003, Mitchell 2006, Sparke 2006a, Walkerdine 2005). In this interpretation, the dispersal of power implied by the notion of governmentality is re-centred around a sovereign conception of state action, now able to reach out all the more effectively into all sorts of arenas in order to secure the conditions of its own (il)legitimacy. The reduction of governmentality to a mechanism of subjectification marks the point at which Foucault s historical, genealogical approach to issues of subject formation is subordinated to presentist functionalism of theories of neoliberalization. This reduction follows from the ambivalence around subject-formation in the formalized models of governmentality that have developed Foucault s ideas. Rose s (1999) analysis of advanced liberal governmentality argues that forms of social government, of which the classical Keynsian welfare state stands as the exemplar, are being supplanted by the de-socialisation of modes of governing. The rationalities of advanced liberal welfare reform take the ethical reconstruction of the welfare recipient as their central problem (ibid. 263). They seek to govern people by regulating the choices made by autonomous actors in the context of their everyday, ordinary commitments to friends, family and community. This rationality is visible in the proliferation of the registers of empowerment and improvement, in which both subjects participating in welfare or development programmes are geared towards 13

14 transforming the relationships that subjects have with themselves (Cruickshank 1999, Li 2007). In analyses of advanced liberal governmentality, these shifts in political rationality are the result of the efforts of a diverse set of actors pursuing plural ends. They do not reflect the aims of a singular, coherent neoliberal project pursued through the agency of the state. This emphasis is lost in the functionalist appropriation of governmentality to bolster theories of neoliberalization. This is compounded by the tendency in this work to presume that the description of political rationalities also describes the actual accomplishment of subject-effects. The vocabulary of theorists of neoliberal governmentality theorists is replete with terms such as elicit, promote, foster, attract, guide, encourage and so on: The key feature of the neo-liberal rationality is the congruence it endeavours to achieve between a responsible and moral individual and an economic-rational actor. It aspires to construct prudent subjects whose moral quality is based on the fact that they rationally assess the costs and benefits of a certain sort as opposed to other alternative acts (Lemke 2001, 201). The point to underscore here is the emphasis on a rationality that endeavours and aspires to bring about certain subject-effects. Narratives of the emergence of neoliberal governmentality display little sense of just whether and how governmental programmes seek to get people to comply with projects of rule or identify with subject-positions. This is in large part because the Foucauldian approach to neoliberalism continues to construe governmentality in terms of a politics of subjection (Clarke 2004d, 70-71). Such an assumption leads almost automatically to the conclusion that neoliberalism degrades any residual potential for public action inherent in liberal democracy (e.g. Brown 2003). Equipped with the concept of governmentality, this sort of presentation of neoliberalism is able to avoid any serious consideration of what sort of action can be exercised on subjects through acting on them at a distance. The idea that governmentality is a distinctive mode of political rule which seeks to hail into existence its preferred subjects, which are then only left with the option of resistance, needs to be treated with considerable scepticism. Understood as a mechanism of subjection, governmentality is assumed to work through the operation of norms. However, Foucauldian theory is chronically unable to acknowledge the work of communicative rationalities in making any action-through-norms possible (Hacking 2004). Theories of governmentality consistently fail to adequately specify the looping-effects between knowledge-technologies, practices, and subjectformation which are implied by the idea of governing at a distance (Barnett 2001). This failure leads to the supposition that governmentality works through representational modes of subjectification rather than through the practical ordering of fields of strategic and communicative action. At the very most, the governmentality approach implies a probabilistic relationship between regulatory rationalities of rule and the transformations of subjectivities, mediated by the rules of chance (Agrawal 2005, ). It might even imply a reorientation of analysis towards understanding the assemblage of dispersed, singular acts rather than on psycho-social processes of individual subjection (Barnett et al 2008). The recuperation of governmentality as a theory of subject-formation, modelled on theories of interpellative hailing, overlooks the distinctive modality of action through which the Foucault addresses questions of subjectivity. Whereas liberalism and neoliberalism are understood in political-economy approaches as market ideologies, from the governmentality perspective liberalism (and by extension neoliberalism) 14

15 should properly refer to a particular problematization of governing, and in particular the problematization of the task of governing free subjects. While a free market ideology might imply a problematization of free subjects, it does not follow that the problematization of free subjects is always and everywhere reducible to the imperatives of free market ideologies. Ong (2006) suggests, for example, a definition of neoliberalism in which long established technologies for administering subjects for self-mastery are only contingently articulated with projects directed at securing profitability. But this clarification still presumes that neoliberalism extends and reproduces itself primarily through a politics of subjection (see also Brown 2006a). It might be better to suppose that the distinctive focus in governmentality studies on modes of problematization should reorient analysis to the forms of what Foucault (1988) once called practices of ethical problematization. This would direct analytical attention to investigating the conditions for individuals to recognize themselves as particular kinds of persons and to reflect upon their conduct - to problematize it - such that they may work upon and transform themselves in certain ways and towards particular goals (Hodges 2002, 457). Two things follow from this reorientation. Firstly, it presumes that subjectivity is the product of situated rationalities of practice, rather than the representational medium of interpellative recognition (Hacking 2002). Secondly, it implies that the proposition that liberal governmentality seeks to construct self-regulating subjectivities should not be too easily reduced to the proposition that these subjectivities are normatively selfinterested egoists (Du Gay 2005). For example, Isin (2004) argues that the distinctive style of problematizing contemporary subjects of rule is in terms of so many neurotic subjects faced with various risks and hazards. One implication of this style of problematizing subjects is that state agencies continue to be the objects of demands to take responsibility for monitoring such neurotic subjects or securing them from harm. In this section we have seen how the third of the approaches to conceptualising neoliberalism identified by Larner (2000), which appeals to the concept of governmentality, can be more or less easily subsumed into the prevalent politicaleconomy interpretation. The assumption that governmentality is a concept that refers to the inculcation of certain sorts of mentality into subjects is the prevalent interpretation of governmentality in geography s usage of this concept to bolster theories of neoliberalization, not least in the proliferation of work on neoliberal subjects. The marriage of political-economy and governmentality therefore generates a shared space of debate that defines state-of-the-art research into neoliberalization (Barnett 2005). While in the political-economy approach, discourses are treated as expressive of other levels of determination, in the governmentality approach political economic processes recede into the background; whereas political-economy approaches privilege class relations over other social relations, the governmentality approach reduces the social field to a plane of subjectification. But these differences converge around a shared assumption that reproduction happens : that subjects live out their self-governing subjection as ascribed by governmental rationalities, or subordinate classes live out their regulatory roles as ascribed by hegemonic projects of consent (Clarke 2004c). And so it is that the social is reduced to the repository of a mysterious force of resistance waiting to be activated by the revelatory force of academic demystification. 15

16 4). TRANSFORMING THE RATIONALITIES OF THE PUBLIC REALM 4.i). EMERGENT RATIONALITIES A shared assumption of the political-economy and the governmentality approaches is the idea that neoliberalism dissolves established patterns of public life. From the political-economy perspective, the public realm is progressively constricted through privatization, the marketization of public services, the introduction of competitive pressures into public institutions, and the infusion of private financial arrangements into public institutions. The governmentality perspective adds to this a view of the progressive individualization of subjectivity, as the public identity of citizen is replaced by proliferating discourses of consumer choice and personal responsibility. 1 Narratives of neoliberalism therefore reiterate a common refrain about the decline of public virtues, collective solidarities, caring values, and common institutions. These narratives overestimate the degree to which existing configurations of public life have been simply dissolved by neoliberal onslaught. For example, the range of organizational reforms in the public sector through which neoliberalism is apparently manifest in the United Kingdom, while certainly shaped by efforts to deflate notions of a singular collective public interest, have generated split representations of public subjects. The public now appears as tax-payers, supporting a logic of curbing spending, curtailing entitlements and maximizing efficiency; as consumers, supporting agendas to maximize the responsive to user needs; as citizens concerned with collective values of equity and fairness; or as scroungers threatening to undermine public values of fair shares and equal entitlements (Clarke 2005, Newman 2004). In turn, a range of new agencies have proliferated, not least those focused on auditing and inspecting other agencies in the interests of the public. This might, of course, all be subsumed beneath the banner of roll-out neoliberalism. But this differentiation of the public realm is not simply an effect of top-down projects to privatize and individualize the public realm meeting the residual resistance of embedded solidarities and loyalties of national-welfare cultures. It is also the product of emergent mobilizations for community participation, equality struggles, and cultural representation. Changes in policy paradigms and welfare regimes are as much ad hoc responses to a range of secular social trends as it is a motivated top-down project of rolling-back the state. These trends include (Clarke 2004b): changing consumer expectations, involving shifts in expectations towards public entitlements which follow from the generalization of consumerism; the decline of deference, involving shifts in conventions and hierarchies of taste, trust, access, and expertise; the refusals of the subordinated, referring to the emergence of antipaternalist attitudes found in, for example, women s health movements or anti-psychiatry movements. the development of the politics of difference, involving the emergence of discourses of institutional discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, and disability. 1 Foucault s work is a rather ambiguous reference for any critique of the dissolution of the public realm under the force of neoliberalism, in so far as it is calls into question the validity of the normative vision of public rationality that is meant to be embodied in those institutional configurations menaced by neoliberalism. 16

17 This range of factors have disrupted the ways in which welfare agencies think about inequality, helping to generate the emergence of contested inequalities, in which policies aimed at addressing inequalities of class and income develop an ever more expansive dynamic of expectation according to which public services should address other kinds of inequality as well. In short, rather than a simple shift from state provision to privatized markets, welfare regimes have been reordered through redistributions of commodified and de-commodified provision and different combinations of social insurance, social assistance, and taxation (Epsing-Andersen 1996). The social relations of welfare consumption have certainly been reordered in highly unequal ways in the process. But the political dynamics of this process is not well captured by a simple narrative of state retreat under neoliberal onslaught. What from one perspective is interpreted as a motivated project of neoliberalization might be better understood as a much broader-based populist reorientation of contemporary politics, policy, and popular cultures. The possibility that what is too readily identified as neoliberalization might be constituted by the mainstreaming of movement agendas is yet to be fully explored (Larner 2007; cf. Leitner et al (2005). Remaining focused on neoliberalization means that all sorts of emergent political formations remain marginalized in this set of debates. These would include environmental politics and the politics of sustainability; new forms of consumer activism oriented by an ethics of assistance and global solidarity; the identity politics of sexuality related to demands for changes in modes of health care provision and other welfare services. These and other movements are indicative of the emergence of a politics of choice that is reshaping relations between states, civil society and capital (see 1998). Much of this emergent politics focuses on issues of consumption, and is therefore easily misinterpreted as just another aspect of a neoliberalized roll-out of market rationality. But this misses the extent to which consumption is re-politicized in these movements, as an entry point into transformative networks of distribution and production which are indicative of evolving new political economies of public life (Murray 2003). In short, theories of neoliberalism are not very good at describing or explaining the contemporary political-economic landscape. Larner and Walters (2004) and Larner et al (2007) deploy the concept of governmentality not to explain how the functionalist requirements of neoliberal ideology are sutured through subject-formation, but rather as a means of accounting for the post facto assemblage of a diverse range of imperatives and programmes into a mobile governmental rationality. This seems more in tune with the cock-up, foul-up approach to theorizing political processes (Mann 1993, 53) to which Foucault s genealogical approach seems well attuned. This interpretation of globalization as governmentality suggests a refinement of what is meant by referring to neoliberalism as a political rationality. It suggests an interpretation of the rationalities shaping policy interventions as emergent effects of ongoing processes of interaction, involving various forms of cooperative behaviour such as bargaining or compromising. Thinking of political rationalities as emergent qualities of dynamic interactions suggests, however, a rather more pluralist theoretical imagination than critical theories of neoliberalism are willing to countenance. 4.ii). WHATARE MARKETS GOOD FOR? The idea that we should focus on the emergent public rationalities of contemporary governmentalities, rather than presuming a top-down imposition of a largely unchanging ideology, follows from taking seriously the type of action that Foucault s own account of governmentality presupposes. Governmentality refers not to 17

18 mechanisms of subjection, but to governing the conduct of conduct, that is, to efforts aimed at structuring the field of action of other actors. The analytics of governmentality rests upon a conception of interaction in terms of strategic games of liberty in which some try to control the conduct of others, who in turn try to turn to avoid allowing their conduct to be controlled or try to control the conduct of the others (Foucault 1997, 299). The action on the action of others that defines governmentality as a distinctive rationality of rule is theorized by reference to actor s efforts to realize their own ends through the enrolment of the strategic capacities of other actors. Foucault differentiated between three senses of strategic relations: a fairly neutral understanding of means-ends relations; a sense of taking advantage of others; and a sense of obtaining victory in struggle (Foucault 2000, 346). And he endorsed the idea that these three senses covered the whole field of power relations, where strategy was understood as the choice of winning solutions (ibid.) in situations of confrontation or competition. Foucault s notion of governmentality therefore rests on a conception in which social interaction is always modeled narrowly on strategic action (Honneth 1991), and has difficulty admitting the possibility of any type of normatively inflected communicative action (Hacking 2004). Furthermore, the analytics of governmentality only admits to a one-dimensional view of strategic action as always competitive action, having difficulty in accounting for observed forms of cooperative strategic action that are the outcome of communicatively-steered agreement. To help us see the importance of thinking more carefully about issues of rational action, it is useful to consider Foucault s own foray onto the territory most favoured by theorists of neoliberalism, in his lecture course on the birth of biopolitics (see Foucault 2000, 73-79; Lemke 2001, Guala 2006). Here Foucault lays out an analysis of the internal relationship between the emergence of governmentality as a distinctively modern technology of governing and liberalism as a distinctively modern form of political reason concerned with the limits of government. Emphasizing that there is no single version of liberal governmentality, Foucault contrasts two traditions of post-war liberal thought: a German school of so-called Ordo-liberalism, that defined the concept of the social market; and the economic liberalism associated with the Chicago School. In Foucault s (2000, 79) view, what is most distinctive about this second line of neoliberal thinking is that it seeks to extend the rationalities of the market, the schemes of analysis it proposes, and the decisionmaking criteria it suggests to areas that are not exclusively or primarily economic. For example, the family and birth policy, or delinquency and penal policy. The extension of economic rationality into all areas of social life which Foucault identifies as a feature of Chicago School neoliberalism is, in fact, just one aspect of a broader reinvention of political economy, in which the reasoning of microeconomics has been applied to all sorts of social phenomena: in the law and economics movement to issues of jurisprudence; in public choice theory to bureaucratic dynamics and constitutional design; and in so-called new public management to the reconfiguration of administrative systems. This economizing of the social and of the state is not merely ideological : it is rooted in the methodological practices of microeconomic reasoning, decision theory, and game theory, which allows various activities to be modeled on the principle that all human behaviour is shaped by economic values of self-interested utility maximization. Foucault s attention to this emergent tradition of political-economy is not eccentric when compared to the ideas of Hayek or Friedman, which geographers assume to be so singularly influential (cf. Sparke 2006b). This attention might 18

19 actually throw more insight on the dynamics of state restructuring upon which theorists of neoliberalism focus their attention. The persistent focus on free market fundamentalism in geographers theorizations of neoliberalism leads to rather tortuous formulations of the observed disjunctures between putative theory (reducing the state) and actual practice (all sorts of state intervention). This betrays a conceptual and normative investment in static idealizations of models of the state and the market, and a preference for analysis of all relationships in terms of contradiction. Foucault s focus on liberalism as a rationality of government enables him to point to the extent to which neoliberal ideas do not, in theory, imply less state action at all. They do, however, imply reformulating the principles and objectives of state activities according to economistic assumptions of individual and corporate behaviour. Far from assuming that the rhetoric of market efficiency and consumer choice are always and everywhere indicative of a privatizing and de-regulatory agenda, it is important to recognize the degree to which this vocabulary and an attendant set of technologies of reform provide new ways of managing government agencies (Slater and Tonkiss 2001, 141). In short, Foucault leads us to ask what it is that markets are supposed to be good for. What problematizations do market rationalities respond to? Hindess (2002, 134-5) suggests that for liberalism, understood as a political rationality of government, the market is the exemplary form of free interaction, the model for how the activities of numerous individuals can be coordinated without central authority. This idealization of the market as a decentralised mechanism of government operates at two levels: firstly, in the immediate present, individuals in markets are governed by the reactions of others with whom they interact; in the longer term, this sort of interaction with others leads to the internalization of standards which individualized use to regulate their own behaviour, so that market interaction is understood to be a good way of inculcating virtues such as prudence and self-control. This set of assumptions implies a wide spectrum of governmental strategies. On the one side, they can justify interventions that seek to govern or make-up subjects able to engage in this sort of interaction. On the other side, they can imply using markets as the means of actually instilling market virtues. This is the understanding of the market as a model for coordinating the actions of dispersed subjects that leads to the distinctive understanding of advanced liberalism in Foucauldian governmentality studies. Advanced liberalism is not defined as an ideology of free markets and minimal states, but as a set of discourses that invoke the power of choice, modelled on economics, as a primary motivator of human action in fields of interacting free subjects. This is a form of discourse that effectively dissolves economy s outside (Engelmann 2005, 33). But it does not necessarily imply that activities of the state should be transferred to the market, only that state activities be re-ordered around systems shaped by market principles. These might vary from introducing competition, treating users as customers or consumers, decentralizing authority, or using audit technologies to encourage a focus on accountability or outcomes. Foucault s attention to the economizing of the social in Chicago-style politicaleconomy should lead to a broadening of focus when it comes to tracing the intellectual genealogy of contemporary policy paradigms. Rather than focussing overwhelmingly on free market economists and explicit agendas for reducing state intervention, which by Marxist and regulationalist theorists own admission can be of little help in understanding how the practices of neoliberalization actually get played out, it might be better to look farther a field. One obvious focus should be on the 19

20 genealogy of rational choice theories in social science. In so far as these traditions are considered at all in theories of neoliberalization, they are dismissed as adjuncts of free market fundamentalism and the supposed hegemony of orthodox economics (Peck 2005). But free market economics does not provide a theory of administrative reform or of the management of public services, nor of constitutional design or of democratic governance. In contrast, public choice theory does. For that reason, public choice theory has been highly significant in the rise of government by the market (Self 1993). Reading this tradition symptomatically throws light upon the reordering of the rationalities of public administration, in contrast to any simple decline or dissolution of the public realm. So what is public choice theory? Public choice theory provides a descriptive and normative methodology for modelling a range of collective decision-making processes: why people join interest groups, how voters choose between parties at election time, how coalitions form in committees and legislatures, how bureaucracies make policy and how sub-national governments deliver policy outputs to citizens (Dunleavy 1991, 2). Public choice theory treats government officials, civil servants, and elected representative as individual actors who respond to economic incentives people involved in collective action are just as they are assumed to act in markets, as selfinterested agents. This work is referred to as public choice because the choices that voters make, while deploying the same motivations and rationalities as consumers in the market, are decisions and preferences about public matters the design of constitutions, the make-up of government, and so on. Public choice theory focuses on the asymmetric distribution of information in market relations, broadly defined, which create incentives for the party with more information to cheat the party with less. In the application of these ideas to political processes in liberal democracy, public choice theory generates a rather dismal view of modern politics dubbed politics without the romance by one leading exponent (Buchanan 1991). Public choice theory is, however, just one strand of a broader tradition of modern social science that deploys economic concepts of rationality to social and political issues. For example, in Kenneth Arrow s impossibility theorem, which is formative of social choice theory and welfare economics, the demonstration of the dependency of any collective preference function on the medium of aggregating individual preferences seems to challenge understandings of democratic legitimacy based on popular sovereignty. In Mancur Olson s seminal account of the logic of collective action, asymmetries of information and problems of free-riding mean that it is more likely that small groups will organise and exert influence than larger ones. When applied to the analysis of welfare systems, these forms of reasoning lead to a view of bureaucracies and bureaucrats as always seeking to maximize their own advantage, through rent-seeking for example, and thereby reducing efficiency of distributive outcomes. This leads to the stronger claim that public goods are actually under-supplied by state bureaucracies, which are prone to capture by special interest groups. Public choice theory therefore belongs to what is a much broader tradition of bureau-critique. Its development as an academic field has certainly been closely associated with a right-wing political inflection (cf. Dunleavy 1991, Dryzek 1992). But the broader tradition of bureau-critique stretches across the political spectrum (see Du Gay 2000). This suggests that, understood as a political rationality of contemporary governmentality, one can read public choice theory symptomatically as 20

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